The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Applications may increase the quality of user interactions if the applications have the ability to obtain locations of their users. An application that has access to the locations of its users is referred to herein as a location-aware application. In contrast, an application that does not have access to the locations of its users is referred to herein as a location-unaware application.
By knowing the locations of its users, a location-aware application may provide users with location-relevant information. For example, a news provider application that serves up news about events in the city/state of a user will generate more demand for its content than a location-unaware application that serves up news about other cities/states.
In another example, some products may have a “location context”. A “location context” of a product refers to the notion that the location of a user may be a factor in the user's interest in the product. For example, heavy coats have a “location context” in that they will generally have higher appeal to users that reside in cold climates. Similarly, advertisements about a restaurant that is only located in a particular city may have higher appeal to users in that city than to users that reside elsewhere.
If an advertised product has a location context, then users outside of the location context may not be interested in hearing about the product. For example, a location-unaware application may advertise a heavy coat to its users in Hawaii, and therefore, generate low response rate to the advertisement from those users. On the other hand, if the application would advertise beach t-shirts to its users in Hawaii, then the response rate to the advertisement would likely be much higher. Thus, location-unaware applications that do not provide location-relevant information to users may experience loss in their user base or their revenues from sources such as advertising.
According to one solution for providing location-relevant information, an application may request its users to enter information about their location. If a user provides locations for the application to use, then the application thereby becomes a location-aware application that can provide location-relevant information. However, a user may decline to enter such information. For example, if an application requests users to enter location information for targeting location-relevant advertisements, many users may decline such requests or provide inaccurate location information. Even when users initially provide accurate location information, users may fail to update their location information when their location changes.
An application may also attempt to extract user location information from user's accessing device. For example, an application may attempt to retrieve GPS data from user's device. If successful, the application thereby becomes a location-aware application that is able to provide location-relevant information. However, a user's privacy restrictions may prevent the application from accessing such information. Thus, the application may have no locations, or an incomplete set of locations.
Another solution for location-unaware applications to provide location-relevant information is to extract user location information from third-party databases. Third-party databases generally contain address-to-location mappings that reflect a snapshot of the mappings that are generally provided by Internet Service Providers (ISP). ISPs assign addresses to their customers and map those addresses to customer location information. However, ISPs regularly re-assign addresses based on ISP requirements, and thus, the databases that the third parties provide tend to contain out-of-date information and require regular updates. Accordingly, the third-party databases may provide low accuracy for mapping user address to locations. In many instances, the accuracy may be less than 50%. Using such low accuracy address-to-location mappings, location-unaware applications may frequently provide inaccurate location-relevant data to users.